Andulka
PR's Tumblrdome
ojovivo
dirt enthusiast
titsay
Today's Document
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i don't do bad sauce passes
YOU ARE THE REASON
if i look back, i am lost
RMH
KIROKAZE
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
cherry valley forever
JBB: An Artblog!
JVL
Cosmic Funnies
art blog(derogatory)
No title available
blake kathryn
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@casethejointfirst
OH MY GOD LOOK AT THIS POSTCARD FROM 1880 IN THE MANCHESTER MUSEUM ARCHIVES
“festive image of Pleistocene mammals”
“a rink in the glacial period”
THIS IMAGE HAS SINGLE-HANDEDLY PUT ME IN THE FESTIVE MOOD
MERRY CHRISTMAS
That’s a vibe
Winter fieldwork
Sampling underwater chert quarries in northwest Florida. A few weeks of working in the Wacissa, Aucilla, and St. Marks Rivers is paying off with some awesome new information about submerged prehistoric quarries!
When your project area floods, you have to adapt. The sites are high and dry, but the access roads are swamped due to biblical rains and consequently high rivers. The floodwaters are quickly receding though, and we carry on! This was not quite what I had in mind for underwater archaeological fieldwork...
Summer Fieldwork 2018- Suwannee chert outcrop in northwest Florida. I will be sampling this location later this summer. Samples collected here will be characterized using neutron activation analysis (NAA) and laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometery!
i found out recently that the very first trees did not rot when they died because the microbes that decompose trees hadnt evolved yet…which makes sense but it’s weird to think about. this actually caused a huge change in the climate at the time and many of these trees turned into coal because of it…
like imagine a tree falling in the forest and the trunk just stays there for years and years with little change, and it only goes away when it is buried under dirt. that’s weird.
obviously they were still working on the worldbuilding back then
imagine all the lag from those trunks laying around. glad they patched those microbes in
Archaeology at Hall's Cave, TX.
Submerged prehistoric archaeology: a view from the dredge barge.
honey is the only food product that never spoils. there are pots of honey that are over five thousand years old and still completely edible
i also want to point out we know it tastes the same even after thousands of years b/c archaeologists who discovered two thousand year old honey tasted it. presumably right after they looked at each other and went “what the hell here goes nothing”
I’m pretty sure they also identify human remains by taste. Archaeologists are straight up freaks.
No, no no… you identify bone from rock or other substances by touching it to your tongue. If it sticks, it’s bone. The taste itself has nothing to do with it. And most archaeologists won’t lick human bones if they know they’re human.
…and I realize that doesn’t actually do much to prove archaeologists aren’t freaks.
mai nam is jane and wen i dig i fynde some roks both smol and big i put my tung upon the stone for science yes i lik the bone
@annleckie
As my soils instructor taught us, if you rub it on your teeth and it’s gritty, it’s sandy. If it’s slimy, it’s clay. Yes, eating dirt is an acceptable engineering practice.
@catsandrocks
Yes, yes, and yes.
Archaeology perks: encountering feral rhesus macaques while at work. They're MEAN, and this one was drawn to us both curiosity and a desire to get in our lunch cooler. Can you spot him to the left of our dive flag?
Submerged prehistoric archaeology, July 2017
Recently, I've been working on analyzing surficial weathering of chert using Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). In order to isolate the weathered surfaces for top-down analysis, chert fragments were mounted in epoxy, cut, ground, and polished. Because the ablation cell is small and geologic samples and lithic artifacts are often prohibitively large, I designed custom sample cups and had them 3D printed. These cups were the right size for the ablation chamber and helped to align the chert samples perfectly. A few failed (leaked), but they still served their purpose in mounting the chert samples. Tomorrow I will analyze the samples! More updates soon!
Sorry for the lack of posts, I've been busy in the lab!
Early emoticons: Neolithic Masks made of shell and stone from Korea, Palestine and Israel. All between 9000-5000 years old.
Neutron Activation Analysis sample preparation, including preparing analytical controls and sealing vials!
George Church on Mammoths
George Church is a professor of Genetics at Harvard University and one of the world’s leading geneticists. He recently published a book with Ed Regis called Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Church and his team are using CRISPR, a gene editing technology, to insert parts of mammoth DNA into the Asian elephant genome. Ideally, this one day result in a whole population of cold-resistant, hairy pachyderms suited for life in the arctic–animals that are physically, behaviorally, and genetically very similar to the extinct woolly mammoth. This interview has been edited and condensed for length.
How is your lab hoping to make a mammoth embryo?
People go into the Siberian ice to get mammoth remains, and you can get broken DNA, and you can use a sequencing device to turn that into a computer data version of the mammoth genome. You put all the little parts together to make a complete mammoth genome, or you can take important parts of the genome and put them on an Asian elephant’s DNA. Then we put the sequence into an Asian elephant’s egg and get it to start multiplying.
In what ways will the mammoth be different from an elephant?
Keep reading
Reblogging my interview with George Church because mammoth resurrection is back in the news. I have to point out that, while cloning mammoths appears to be trending, not a lot has changed. Except, Church now says that he wouldn’t want to use an elephant to gestate a mammoth fetus, he’d want to use an artificial womb, if anyone ever invents one. Specifically, a womb large and effective enough to gestate a baby pachyderm for more than a year.
Should we?
@bogleech look at this drawing I made when I was 4!
a stern warning to all mankind, the hubris of science chillingly laid bare
A cautionary tale.
I haven’t quite thought this out enough to have my thoughts totally clear, but I usually clarify my thoughts by writing them down, so I’m gonna try it anyway. For context I am writing as an ethnically Jewish white person.
I have seen some Discourse where person A says something like “We can’t dehumanize the people we’re fighting,” and then Person B goes “Yeah, this was why we shouldn’t have punched that Nazi!” and then Person C goes “Uh, we have to punch Nazis,” and then Person D says “Nazis aren’t people!” and then the whole Discourse Cycle starts up again.
The problem, I think, is that we are taking “don’t dehumanize” as code for “be nice to?” And that’s not what it is. “Don’t dehumanize” means understanding there is not a profound difference between yourself and a person who believes something repugnant. Otherwise, it becomes too tempting to think that a repugnant belief is some kind of monstrous mental defect that we get to just magically Not Have, because we – after all – are people, and Nazis are Not People.
If we believe that we are immune to repugnant beliefs, we become incredibly vulnerable to them. Sorry if I’m being redundant here, but I really want to spell this out: If we think that Nazis aren’t people, we open a door that is going to kill our ability to be useful, effective, intersectional activists. We will absolutely become complacent. Beliefs will creep up slowly in our brains, because that’s what brains do, they gather information and make just whatever crap soup out of it, and we – if we sense the development of these ideas at all – will go “Well, this must NOT be a repugnant belief, because only Not-People have repugnant beliefs, and I am a Person!”
And again, that’s not synonymous with saying that “If you want to punch Nazis in the face YOU’RE JUST AS BAD AS THEM!!!!” That’s crazy and garbage. It’s also not synonymous with “We have to tolerate Nazi beliefs!” I am trying to make a pretty straightforward statement that Nazis are people. They are people, and we have to look that fact dead on, and then we have to punch those people in the face, hard and often.
Nazis ARE people and tbh that’s part of why they’re so terrifying to me.
If you believe Nazis aren’t people, then you will refuse to believe that anyone who is (to you) self-evidently a person could really be a Nazi. It should go without saying that this is counterproductive.
Also: if you insist that Nazis aren’t people so that you can justify treating them in a fashion that you believe one must never ever treat people, thaaaat’s kind of morally bankrupt. Not because the way you want to justify treating Nazis is necessarily a wrong way to treat Nazis, but because what you need to do is rigorously reexamine that never ever.
Humans are humans. Are they a bipedally locomoting homonin/ biologically a member of Homo sapiens? Then they're human. The prevalence of unrelentingly extreme cultural relativists is astounding.
Do they believe and propagate shitty things that warrant a punch in the face? Then punch them. Honestly sometimes pain is the only way an organism learns to not do a stupid thing. Bad people get got.
